


Now We Can Begin

by ClementineStarling



Category: Hellraiser & Related Fandoms
Genre: Mild Sexual Content, Multi, Torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-30
Updated: 2016-10-30
Packaged: 2018-08-27 23:56:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,322
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8422696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClementineStarling/pseuds/ClementineStarling
Summary: Set after the first chapter of The Hellbound Heart.  “Oh, so you’ve finished dreaming,” said the Cenobite, perusing him as he lay panting on the bare boards. “Good."She stood up. "Now we can begin...”





	

**Author's Note:**

> Initially intended as a fill for viceindustrious' prompt:
>
>> So there's this line in the Hellbound Heart: "They recognized no principles of reward and punishment by which he could hope to win some respite from their tortures, nor were they touched by any appeal for mercy. **He'd tried that, over the weeks and months that separated the solving of the box from today.** " Emphasis mine. Tell me about it! ([x](http://unsettledink.livejournal.com/112061.html?thread=1066173#t1066173)),
> 
>   
> now mostly meant to meet scrapbullet's desire for ever more Hellraiser fic. :3 

What came after the dream of sensations, this crescendo of smell and sounds and touch, was indefinitely worse.

She touched him, gently, her fingers a silky sprawl over his ribs, but under the inhuman softness of her skin she was cold as ice, and it burned him to the core. The pain was so exquisite in its overwhelming strangeness, Frank did not even realise the world fell away, darkness crumbling down on them like sand through an hourglass. All he registered was his blood freezing, sharp icicles dragging their way through his veins. His chest was too tight. No air, only a flare of agony.

The dark was soft as blanket after that. She hummed contently and took her hand away.

He should have panicked then but instead he just sucked the air greedily into his lungs. 

It tasted of vanilla, so thick and cloying it made him retch, and yet he could not get enough, drew breath after breath of it until he had assuaged his need, and it wasn't till then that he registered the stench beneath, sweet like rotting flesh, metallic like blood and other odours of an even less savoury nature. He almost missed the brain-freezing cold.

Did he say that aloud? He must have, because she smiled and said: “As you wish, darling.”

This time it wasn't the dark falling down on him but flakes of purest light, like petals, like downs they came fluttering from above, their touch feathery and cold for a mere second before they melted on his skin. Snow. It evoked the most sensual sparks of discomfort, a premonition of agony like the smallest needle-pricks to fade almost immediately, yet they made his flesh tingle.

Frank thought of their promise to give him sensation he had never known before. Perhaps, despite their somewhat gruesome appearance they would keep their word.

He tried to relax, welcome to flash of cold against the heat of his body, and it did work for a while. He was aroused. He felt her gaze on him, and what did he care that she was pale as death and slick as slug-like tongues. She was a woman and he could smell her through the chill.

Her smile was benevolent (almost) as she watched him while the snow fell and fell and he grew cold and colder. 

After a while he realised there was nothing around them but the howling wind, and above them a vast, bottomless darkness, like the eye of God – without mercy or forgiveness. It took him another moment to comprehend he was gazing into space and its knife-glint to be the light of dead-stars. Perhaps it wasn't snow but stardust falling down on him, the ashes of worlds long gone. She brought him here to behold the void and know he was lost, absolutely and utterly alone. That was when he started praying. 

Not immediately of course – he tried to plead with her first, beg and bargain, then swear and struggle, spit useless threats at her, at last promise her whatever came to his mind, but she just kept watching him, unperturbed, as he begun to shake and shiver. With his teeth chattering his promises became more desperate, and still she did not move. She just observed how the frostbite turned his limbs into porcelain, white and smooth as a doll's.

Frank would have imagined there was a point where he would simply give up – accept his fate. But it is true what they say, hope dies last. So what he did was pray. 

He had never been religious, the idea of a higher power had just seemed ludicrous, but now, in face of what must be death, he learned the meaning of faith, of hope. There was ecstasy in surrender, bliss in fear, and he heard her laughing, bright and clear over the raging elements before everything faded into the drone of the universe.

He came to again in soft, cosy darkness, a hand resting hot and heavy on his chest. 

“You didn't think we would let you slip away so easily, did you?”

It was a male voice, deep and soothing as a lullaby, and Frank wanted to lose himself in it, oh how much he wanted to, but the creature's touch burnt like a brand against his skin. It wasn't the icy cold of the female but a scorching heat, lighting his nerve endings on fire. 

He didn't know whether to be relieved he still had a body or to be terrified.  
“Please,” he whispered, his tongue a furry dead weight in his mouth. 

“Have you not yet learned, mortal,” said the man with an almost amused quirk of his lips, “that begging will get you nowhere?” He trailed his fingers down Frank's abdomen, creating an ache that was only half pain. 

Frank comprehended his intention only when the hand didn't not stop, just gliding deeper. He certainly wasn't a prude, much less an innocent, but he he had never--

“No!” he moaned as the fingers closed around him.

“Yes,” the cenobite hissed as he stroked. “Oh yes.” 

And indeed, Frank's body didn't share his mind's aversion to the touch of a man. His cock was as hard and eager as it had ever been, perhaps even more so. Whatever strange magic the cenobite wrought, Frank could not escape it, he had no choice but to bear the touch, the awful friction of clever fingers and their pull, their terrible pull. 

“There is no use fighting this,” the cenobite said, “there is only surrender.”

And his body understood, mindlessly, it grew still under the cenobite's hand. Frank could not even have said what exactly it was he did to him – it hurt, more than anything ever had before, yet his body refused to register the sensation for was it was. It twisted it around, turned it into something else entirely.

Intellectually Frank _knew_ , the cenobite was taking him apart, bit by bit, piece by piece, that he was breaking beneath him, dissolving, and yet only his mind seemed to care, the awareness of his imminent end a horror that was drowned out be the sheer pleasure of destruction. 

A body is easily subdued, he learned, it can reprogramme the stimuli, escape excruciating pain by interpreting it as pleasure. The body was a liar. It betrayed him to his tormentors without much resistance. But his mind struggled with the truth. How could it bear the knowledge of death, the realisation of its own ending? So it kept up its mantra of pleas, this endless prayer for mercy, – _he had erred, he had been misled; he would do anything if they let him go, if only they let him go, please, oh please_ – though to no avail. 

The angel he was beseeching knew nothing of clemency or compassion. He just gazed at him with his obsidian eyes, unmoved, as if feeding on Frank's suffering before he passed him on to the next creature, and the next, and every time Frank repeated his pleas and every time they remained unheard. 

Frank was remade countless times, broken apart and stitched back together only to be broken again, his whole being a kaleidoscopic collection of shards and pieces, spinning perception from madness and truth from pain. And then, just when he'd believed all hope lost, when he was ready to become nothing, his prayer was finally answered, although not by the creatures holding him captive. 

The blood called to him as it dripped on the wooden floor, his brother's blood, hot and fresh and powerful, pattering his name: _Frank-Frank-Frank_ it said, and he reached out to suck it up. And then he remembered. 

The next time he heard the sound of blood, its lush thrum sweet as summer rain, he answered it, tapping its rhythm against the paper-thin curtain between the worlds. 

“I hear you,” Julia said into the darkness above him, and the veil began to lift.


End file.
